270 PEESIDEXTIAL ADDEESS. 



of the weak and helpless must with Spartan firmness be 

 carried out voluntarily and deliberately. Against such a 

 course all that is best in us revolts. The use of the Lamarck- 

 ian factors (use- inheritance), on the contrary, is not attended 

 with any such revolting consequences. All that we call 

 education, culture, training, is by the use of these. Our 

 hopes of race-improvement, therefore, are strictly conditioned 

 on the fact that the Lamarckian factors are still operative, 

 that changes in the individual, if in useful direction, are to 

 some extent inherited and accumulated in the race." 



Now even if the outlook were as gloomy as Professor Le 

 Conte believes it to be, this will not alter the stern facts of 

 inheritance. To say, " The consequences of my view are so 

 much more comforting than the consequences of your view, 

 that my view' must be true," can hardly be regarded as valid 

 argument. Such pleading for use-inheritance is, however, 

 presumably not addressed to the man of science as such, but 

 to the philanthropist as such. But, without forejudging a 

 case which is still, 1 contend, sub jtidice, I think that, sup- 

 posing use-inheritance be disproved, the possibilities of race- 

 improvement do not lie wholly in a ruthless and pitiless 

 system of social elimination. 



The race, like the individual, is moulded in relation to its 

 environment. Now for the human race, as human, the 

 environment is largely and increasingly a matter of ideas 

 and ideals. I have not time to enter into this question, but 

 I utterly disbelieve that natural selection is the main deter- 

 mining factor of human progress. Now, what we seek to do 

 by the spread of intellectual training, and of that which is 

 more important by far, moral training, is to let each succeed- 

 ing generation grow ujd in closer and closer touch with an 

 improved and improving environment of intellectual ideas 

 and moral ideals. If each generation grows up in better 



